If You Could See Me Now

Elizabeth pulled her dressing gown tighter around her body and secured it at the waist. She tucked her long legs up underneath her body and snuggled down into the oversized armchair in the living room. Her wet hair sat tower-like on the top of her head, twisted in a towel; her skin smelled fruity from her passion fruit bubble bath. She cradled a fresh cup of coffee, complete with dollop of cream, in her hands and stared at the television. She was literally watching paint dry. Her favourite house makeover show was on and she loved to see how they could transform the most run-down rooms into sophisticated, elegant homes.

Ever since she was a child she had loved giving everything she touched a makeover. She had passed the time, spent waiting for her mother to return, by decorating the kitchen table with scattered daisies, sprinkling glitter on the welcome mat by the door, causing a trail of glitter to garnish the dull stone floors of the bungalow, decorating the photo frames with fresh flowers and sprinkling the bed linen with petals. She supposed it was her fix-it nature, always wanting something better than she had, never settling, never satisfied.

She also supposed it was her own childish way of trying to convince her mother to stay. She remembered thinking that perhaps the prettier the house, the longer her mother would remain home. But the daisies on the table were celebrated for no more than five minutes, the glitter on the doormat quickly trampled on, the flowers by the photo frames could not survive without water and the petals on the bed would be tossed and float to the floor during her mother’s fitful night’s sleep. As soon as these were tired of, Elizabeth would immediately start thinking of something that would really grab and take hold of her mother’s attention, something that she would be drawn to for longer than five minutes, something that she would love so much she would be unable to leave it. Elizabeth never considered that as her mother’s daughter, she should have been that something.

As she got older she grew to love bringing the beauty out in things. She had had much practice with that at her father’s old farmhouse. Now she loved the days at work when she could restore old fireplaces and rip up ancient carpets to reveal beautiful original floors. Even in her own home she was always changing things, rearranging and trying to improve. She strived for perfection. She loved setting herself tasks, sometimes impossible ones, to prove to her heart that underneath every seemingly ugly thing there was something beautiful inside.

She loved her job, loved the satisfaction it brought, and with all the new housing developments in Baile na gCroíthe and the surrounding nearby towns, she had made a very good living out of it. If anything new was happening, Elizabeth’s company was the one the developers all called. She was a firm believer that good design enhanced life. Beautiful, comfortable and functional spaces were what she endorsed.

Her own living room was about soft colours and textures. Suede cushions and fluffy carpets; she loved to touch and feel everything. There were light colours of coffees and creams and just like the mug in her hand they helped clear her mind. In a world where most things were a clutter, having a peaceful home was vital to her sanity. It was her hideaway, her nest, where she could hide from the problems outside her door. At least in her home she was in control. Unlike the rest of her life, she could allow whoever she wanted in, she could decide how long they should stay and where in her home they could be. Not like a heart that invites people in without permission, holds them in a special place she never had any say in and then yearns for them to remain there longer than they plan. No, the guests in Elizabeth’s home could come and go on her command. And she chose for them to stay away.

Friday’s meeting had been vital. She had spent weeks planning for it, updating her portfolio, creating a slide show, gathering magazine cuttings and newspaper write-ups of the places she had designed. Her whole life’s work had been condensed into a folder book in order to convince these people to hire her. An old tower standing high on the mountainside overlooking Baile na gCroíthe was to be knocked down to make space for a hotel. It had once protected the small town from approaching attackers during the Viking times, but Elizabeth couldn’t see the point of it remaining there today as it was neither pretty nor of any historical interest. When the tour buses, packed full with eager eyes from all over the world, passed through Baile na gCroíthe, the tower wasn’t even mentioned. No one was proud of it nor interested in it. It was an ugly pile of stones that had been allowed to crumble and decay, that by day housed the village teenagers and by night housed the village drunks, Saoirse having been among both groups.

But many of the townspeople had put up a fight to prevent the hotel from being built, claiming the tower had some sort of mythical and romantic story behind it. A story began to circulate that if the building was knocked down, all love would be lost. It grabbed the attention of the tabloids and soft news programmes, and eventually the developers saw the opportunity for an even bigger goldmine than expected. They decided to restore the tower to a version of its former glory and build around it, leaving the tower as a historical piece for their courtyard, that way keeping the love alive in the Town of Hearts. There was suddenly a huge rush of interest from believers all around the country wanting to stay in the hotel to be near the tower blessed by love.

Elizabeth would have driven the JCB through it herself. She thought it was a ridiculous story, one created by a town afraid of change and intent on keeping the tower on the mountain. It was a story kept alive for tourists and dreamers, but she couldn’t deny that the job of designing the hotel’s interiors would be perfect for her. It would be a small place, but one that would provide employment for the people of Hartstown. Better yet, it was only a few minutes from her home and she wouldn’t have to worry about being away from Luke for long periods of time while working on the project.

Before Luke was born Elizabeth used to travel all the time. She would never spend more than a few weeks in Baile na gCroíthe and loved having the freedom to move around and work in different counties on various projects. Her last big project took her to New York, but as soon as Luke was born that had all ended. When Luke was younger, Elizabeth couldn’t continue with her work around the country, never mind around the world. It had been a very difficult time, trying to set up her business in Baile na gCroíthe and trying to get used to raising a child again. She had no other choice but to hire Edith, as her father wouldn’t help out and Saoirse certainly hadn’t any interest. Now Luke was older and settled at school, Elizabeth was discovering that finding work within commuting distance was becoming increasingly difficult. The development boom in Baile na gCroíthe would eventually settle and she constantly worried whether the work would then dry up completely.

Her walking out of the meeting on Friday should not have happened. Nobody in her office could sell her abilities as an interior decorator better than she could. Her employees consisted of receptionist Becca, and Poppy. Becca was a timid and extremely shy seventeen-year-old, who had joined Elizabeth in her transition year while on work experience and decided not to go back to school. She was a hard worker who kept to herself, and was quiet around the office, which Elizabeth liked. Elizabeth had hired her quickly after Saoirse, who had been hired by Elizabeth to work there part time, had let her down. She had more than let her down and Elizabeth had been desperate to get someone in quickly. To tidy up the mess. Again. Keeping Saoirse near her during the day as an attempt to help her on her feet had only succeeded in driving her further away and knocking her right back down.

Then there was twenty-five-year-old Poppy, a recent graduate from art college, full of lots of wonderfully impossible creative ideas and ready to paint the world a colour she had yet to invent. There were just the three of them in the office but Elizabeth often called on the services of Mrs Bracken, a sixty-eight-year-old genius with a needle and thread, who ran her own upholstery shop in the town. She was also an incredible grump and insisted on being called Mrs Bracken and not Gwen, out of respect for her dearly departed MrBracken, whom Elizabeth didn’t think had been born with a first name. And finally there was Harry, fifty-two years old and an all-round handyman, who could do anything from hanging paintings to rewiring buildings but who couldn’t understand the concept of an unmarried woman with a career, not to say an unmarried woman with a career and a child not her own. Depending on people’s budgets, Elizabeth would do anything from instructing painters and decorators to doing it all herself, but mostly she liked to be hands-on. She liked to see the transformation before her very eyes and it was part of her nature to want to fix everything herself.

It wasn’t unusual for Saoirse to have shown up at Elizabeth’s house that morning. She would often arrive drunk and abusive, and willing to take anything that she could get her hands on – anything worth selling, of course, which automatically excluded Luke. Elizabeth didn’t even know if it was just the drink she was addicted to any more; it was a long time since she’d had a conversation with her sister. She had been trying to help her since she was fourteen. It was as if a switch had been flicked in her head and they had lost her to another world. She tried sending her to counselling, rehab, doctors, she gave her money, found her jobs, hired her herself, allowed her to move in with her, rented her flats. She had tried being her friend, had tried being her enemy, had laughed with her and shouted at her, but nothing would work. Saoirse was lost to her, lost in a world where nobody else mattered.

Elizabeth couldn’t help thinking of the irony of her name. Saoirse wasn’t free. She may have felt that she was, coming and going as she pleased, not being tied down to anyone, anything, any place, but she was a slave to her addictions. She couldn’t see it, though, and Elizabeth couldn’t help her see it. She couldn’t turn her back completely on her sister but she had run out of energy, ideas and faith in ever believing Saoirse could be changed, and had lost lovers and friends with her persistence. Their frustration would grow as they stood by and watched Elizabeth being taken advantage of time and time again till they could no longer be in her life. But contrary to their beliefs, Elizabeth didn’t feel like the victim. She was always in control. She knew what and why she was doing what she was doing, and she refused to desert a family member. She would not be like her mother. She had worked too hard all her life at trying not to be.

Elizabeth suddenly pressed Mute on the television remote control and the room was silenced. She cocked her head to one side. She thought she’d heard something again. After looking around the room and seeing that everything was as it should be, she turned the volume back up again.

There it was again.

She silenced the TV once more and stood up from the armchair.

It was 10.15 and not yet fully dark. She looked out to the back garden and in the dusk she could only see black shadows and shapes. She pulled the curtains closed quickly and immediately felt safer in her cream and beige cocoon. She tightened her dressing gown again and sat back down in her armchair, tucking her legs even closer to her body and wrapping her arms protectively around her knees. The vacant cream leather couch stared back at her. She shuddered again, turned the volume up even higher than before and took a gulp of coffee. The velvety liquid slid down her throat and warmed her insides and she tried once again to be sucked back into the world of television.

All day she had felt odd. Her father always said that when you got a chill up your spine it meant that someone was walking over your grave. Elizabeth didn’t believe that but as she stared at the television, she turned her head away from the three-seater leather couch and tried to shake off the feeling that a pair of eyes was watching her.

Ivan watched her mute the television once again, quickly put her coffee cup on the table next to her and jump out of her chair as though she had been sitting on pins. Here she goes again, he thought. Her eyes were wide and terrified as they darted around the room. Once again Ivan prepared himself and pushed his body to the edge of the couch. The denim of his jeans squeaked against the leather.

Elizabeth jumped to face the couch.

She grabbed a black iron poker from the large marble fireplace and spun round on her heels. Her knuckles turned white as they tightened around it. She slowly tiptoed about the room, eyes wild with fear. The leather squeaked again underneath him and Elizabeth charged towards the couch. Ivan leaped from his seat and dived into the corner.

He hid behind the curtains for protection and watched as she pulled the cushions out of the chair while grumbling to herself about mice. After ten minutes of searching through the couch, Elizabeth put all the cushions back in place to restore its immaculate form.

She picked up her coffee cup self-consciously and made her way into the kitchen. Ivan followed closely on her heel; he was so close that strands of her soft hair tickled his face. Her hair smelled of coconut and her skin of rich fruits.

He couldn’t understand his fascination with her. He had been watching her since after lunch on Friday. Luke had kept calling him to play game after game and all Ivan had wanted was to be around Elizabeth. At first it was just to see if she could hear him or sense him again, but then after a few hours he found her compelling. She was obsessively neat. He noticed she couldn’t leave the room to answer the phone or front door until everything had been tidied away and wiped clean. She drank a lot of coffee, stared out to her garden, picked imaginary pieces of fluff from almost everything. And she thought. He could see it in her face. Her brow would furrow in concentration and she would make facial expressions as though she was having conversations with people in her head. They seemed to turn into debates more often than not, judging by the activity on her forehead.

He noticed she was always surrounded by silence. There was never any music or sounds in the background like most people had, a radio blaring, the window open to allow in the sounds of summer – the birdsong and the lawn mowers. Luke and she spoke little and when they did it was mostly her giving him orders, him asking permission, nothing fun. The phone rarely rang, nobody called by. It was almost as if the conversations in her head were loud enough to fill her silence.

He spent most of Friday and Saturday following her around, sitting on the cream leather couch in the evenings and watching her watching the only programme she seemed to like on TV. They both laughed in the same places, groaned in the same places and they seemed to be completely in sync, yet she didn’t know he was there. He had watched her sleeping the previous night. She was restless – she slept only three hours at the most; the rest of the time she spent reading a book, putting it down after five minutes, staring into space, picking the book up again, reading a few pages, reading back over the same pages, putting it down again, closing her eyes, opening them again, turning the light on, doodling sketches of furniture and rooms, playing with colours and shades and scraps of material, turning the light off again.

She had made Ivan tired just watching her from the straw chair in the corner of the room. The trips to the kitchen for coffee couldn’t have helped her either. On Sunday morning she was up early, tidying, vacuuming, polishing and cleaning an already spotless home. She spent all morning at it while Ivan played chasing with Luke out in the back garden. He recalled Elizabeth being particularly upset by the sight of Luke running around the garden laughing and screaming to himself. She had joined them at the kitchen table and watched Luke playing cards, shaking her head and looking worried when he explained the rules of patience in extreme detail to thin air.

But when Luke went to bed at nine o’clock, Ivan read him the story of Tom Thumb quicker than he usually would, and then hurried to continue watching Elizabeth. But he could sense her getting jitterier as the days wore on.

She washed her coffee cup out, ensuring it was already spotless before putting it in the dishwasher. She dried the wet sink with a cloth and put the cloth in the wash basket in the utility room. She picked imaginary fluff from a few items in her path, picked crumbs from the floor, switched off all the lights and began the same process in the living room. She had done the exact same thing the last two nights.

But before leaving the living room this time, she stopped abruptly, almost sending Ivan into the back of her. His heart beat wildly. Had she sensed him?

She turned round slowly.

He fixed his shirt to look presentable.

Once facing him he smiled. ‘Hi,’ he said, feeling very self-conscious.

She rubbed her eyes tiredly and opened them again. ‘Oh, Elizabeth, you are going mad,’ she whispered. She bit her lip and charged towards Ivan.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_93bfeac7-e936-5790-9601-b4731cba0267)

Elizabeth knew she was losing her mind right at that moment. It had happened to her sister and mother, and now it was her turn. For the last few days she had felt incredibly insecure, as if someone was watching her. She had locked all the doors, drawn all the curtains, set the alarm. That probably should have been enough but now she was going to go that one step further.

She charged through the living room straight towards the fireplace, grabbed the iron poker, marched out of the room, locked the door and made her way upstairs. She looked at the poker lying on her bedside locker, rolled her eyes and turned her lamp off. She was losing her mind.

Ivan emerged from behind the couch and looked around. He had dived behind it thinking Elizabeth was charging towards him. He had heard the door lock after she stormed out. He slumped with a disappointment he had never experienced before. She still hadn’t seen him.

* * *

I’m not magic, you know. I can’t cross my arms, nod my head, blink and disappear and reappear on the top of a bookshelf or anything. I don’t live in a lamp, don’t have funny little ears, big hairy feet or wings. I don’t replace loose teeth with money, leave presents under a tree or hide chocolate eggs. I can’t fly, climb up the walls of buildings or run faster than the speed of light.

And I can’t open doors.

That has to be done for me. The grown-ups find that part the funniest but also the most embarrassing when their children do it in public. I don’t laugh at grown-ups when they can’t climb trees or can’t say the alphabet backwards because it’s just not physically possible for them. It doesn’t make them freaks of nature.

So Elizabeth needn’t have locked the living-room door when she went to bed that night because I couldn’t turn the handle anyway. Like I said, I’m not a superhero; my special power is friendship. I listen to people and I hear what they say. I hear their tones, the words they use to express themselves and, most importantly, I hear what they don’t say.

So all I could do that night was think about my new friend, Luke. I need to do that occasionally. I make notes in my head so that I can file a report for admin. They like to keep it all on record for training purposes. We’ve new people joining up all the time. In fact, when I’m between friends, I lecture.

I needed to think about why I was here. What made Luke want to see me? How could he benefit from my friendship? The business is run extremely professionally and we must always provide the company with a brief history of our friends and then list our aims and objectives. I could always identify the problem straight away but this scenario was slightly baffling. You see, I’d never been friends with an adult before. Anyone who has ever met one would understand why. There’s no sense of fun with them. They stick rigidly to schedules and times, they focus on the most unimportant things imaginable, like mortgages and bank statements, when everyone knows that the majority of the time it’s the people around them that put the smiles on their faces. It’s all work and no play, and I work hard, I really do, but playing is by far my favourite.

Take, for example, Elizabeth; she lies in bed worrying about car tax and phone bills, babysitters and paint colours. If you can’t put magnolia on a wall then there are always a million other colours you can use; if you can’t pay your phone bill then just write letters telling them. People forget they have options. And they forget that those things really don’t matter. They should concentrate on what they have and not what they don’t have. But I’m veering away from the story again.

I worried about my job a little the night I was locked in the living room. It’s the first time that had ever happened. I worried because I couldn’t figure out why I was there. Luke had a difficult family scenario but that was normal and I could tell he felt loved. He was happy and loved playing, he slept well at night, ate all his food, had a nice friend called Sam and when he spoke I listened and listened and tried to hear the words he wasn’t saying but there was nothing. He liked living with his aunt, was scared of his mom and liked talking about vegetables with his granddad. But Luke seeing me every day and wanting to play with me every day meant that I definitely needed to be here for him.

On the other hand, his aunt never slept, ate very little, was constantly surrounded by silence so loud that it was deafening, she had nobody close to her to talk to, that I had seen yet anyway, and she didn’t say far more than she did actually say. She had heard me say thank you once, felt my breath a few times, heard me squeak on the leather couch but yet she couldn’t see me nor could stand me being in her house.

Elizabeth did not want to play.